1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to systems and methods for generating user profiles.
2. Discussion of Background Art
A user profile, used in service personalization, is a structured construct containing information both directly and indirectly pertaining to a user's preferences, behavior, and context. Since personalization of services, content and user interactions is seen as key to a superior customer experience, it is important for service providers to build and maintain accurate models of a customer's preferences, interests and background through a user profile.
In doing so, however, several problems need to be confronted.
First, there is a lack of rich user profile information. Typical user profiles, such as those used by services on the web, are unable to capture rich information about a user. A profile is not merely a weighted vector of ‘interest’ keywords, rather it needs to capture user context, behavior and domain-relevant associations between the constituents of a profile. Current user profiling systems can be said to be of two general types: questionnaire-based profiling systems (i.e. asserted profile systems), and inference-based profile systems.
In questionnaire-based systems, users assert facts about themselves through questionnaire-based schemes. The service asks the user what it thinks are pertinent questions, and the answers to these questions are used to build a user profile. This approach, however, has several disadvantages: One, users may not enter complete information. Two, they might have already entered the requested information at other services and may not like to repeat themselves. Three, information needed for personalization is often orthogonal or contextual in nature to the service or interaction at hand. This information either lies elsewhere, or was not anticipated when the questionnaire was designed.
With inference-based profile systems, the system attempts to infer information about a user, for instance by analyzing user clickstreams, or mining user behavior, interaction or navigation patterns. However a service analyzing the interactions of a user with only itself is prone to make erroneous or very limited inferences.
A second problem that needs to be confronted is the new service spareness problem. When a user interacts with a new service for the first few times, there is a limited interaction history and the new service has a very sparse information model about the user. This may be because the number of user interactions with the new service is too small for an inferred profile to be generated, and usually asserted profile information is not enough. As a result, the sparseness profile problem encountered by new services tend to prevent effective personalization.
Some approaches attempt to address some of these problems using domain-specific data sharing agreements. In these schemes explicit data sharing agreements or schemes are in place between two or more parties to construct user profiles. The disadvantage with this approach is that manual or explicit point-to-point data sharing schemes and agreements need to already be in place between the different services so that data sharing can occur.
In response to the concerns discussed above, what is needed is a system and method for generating a user profile that overcomes the problems of the prior art.